Life lessons

This semester, after a two-year stint as a full-time visiting professor at Framingham State University, I’m back to teaching there part-time: basically the same job, but with a smaller teaching load, fewer departmental responsibilities, and significantly less pay. To make up some of the financial difference, I’ve taken a part-time position as an adjunct lecturer at Babson College in Wellesley, a college whose campus is conveniently located on my way to Framingham. Two days a week, I teach at Babson in the morning and Framingham State in the afternoon, and on the other days, I grade papers, prep classes, and answer student emails from home.

This is how contingent faculty far off the tenure track make their living; my situation is in no way unique. Throughout graduate school and beyond, I was a roads scholar, juggling classes at multiple institutions: drive in, teach, drive somewhere else, repeat. My two years of full-time teaching at Framingham State were the exception, not the rule. Even during the decade I was employed as a full-time instructor at Keene State College, I didn’t receive benefits and taught online to cover my health insurance premiums. Long before the gig economy had a name, I’ve supported myself for decades with a long string of side-hustles.

In the year leading up to my fiftieth birthday, I spent a lot of time quietly lamenting the sorry state of my contingent career. I love teaching, but it often feels like the academy doesn’t love me back. I didn’t go to grad school, after all, with dreams of being a perpetual part-timer, and there is something quaintly pathetic about middle-aged adjuncts like me: we’re the folks at the party who have long overstayed our welcome.

Adjuncting is a rite of passage when you’re in graduate school, and most folks either merge onto the tenure track or move onto other things. But for better or worse, I’ve made a lasting living out of temporary employment. Out of necessity, I’ve become the person who can step in at the last minute when someone suddenly goes on leave or moves onto a better job. If I were a basketball player rather than a college instructor, I’d be the role player way down the bench who can plug into any team mid-season: a quintessential team-player who will never be an All-Star.

I sometimes think of myself as an itinerant, like the pioneer preachers who rode from town to town on horseback with nothing but a Bible and a head full of homilies. Nobody becomes a superstar through circuit riding, but there are plenty of communities that relied upon preachers who passed through intermittently, but with great faith. The need for itinerants always outstrips the resources to compensate them.

What I lack in lasting job security, I make up for in breadth of experience. Almost a month into the semester, I’ve quickly realized that Babson and Framingham State are very different institutionally and in terms of student demographics, so twice a week when I steer my Subaru from one campus to the other, I move from world to world, culture to culture, gaining a perspective that professors who teach at only one college necessarily lack. The best college professors make a conscious effort to teach the students in front of them, not some theoretical idea of what a student “should” be. When you’re contingent faculty, the nature of the students in front of you changes from day to day and hour to hour, depending on where you find yourself.

This morning for the second Sunday in a row, I woke up early, did my morning chores, then drove to the Cambridge Zen Center, where I meditated for one session before heading to Harvard Square, where I wrote my morning journal pages over a small cup of Burdick’s dark hot chocolate.

Sitting one rather than four Sunday morning meditation sessions means your practice is necessarily concentrated. You can’t space out for minutes at a time, figuring you’ll pay attention later. Knowing you have only thirty minutes to sit following your breath, you pay close attention to every minute, saving nothing for “later.”

This, in my experience, is the difference between living at a Zen Center and simply visiting. When I lived at the Cambridge Zen Center, I quickly grew accustomed to the mundane nature of Dharma room practice, taking it for granted and not paying as close attention over time. When you live in a Zen Center, it’s easy to show up in body but not fully in mind. When you drive in from the suburbs to sit a brief half hour, on the other hand, you take care to pay close attention to that time, recognizing it as a precious respite in a sea of hurry.

A cup of dark hot chocolate is like this too. Burdick’s chocolate is rich, intensely flavored, and delivers a day-long buzz: a whole day of energy in one small cup. If I lived next door to Burdick’s, I might take it for granted, growing too accustomed to a mid-morning pick-me-up. Instead, a concentrated cup of dark chocolate is an occasional reward I give myself on those Sundays when I get up early and go to the Zen Center as planned: a good start to a new week, capped with something strong and just a little bit sweet.

This morning after sitting a single session at the Cambridge Zen Center, I slipped out of practice and walked to Harvard Square, where I treated myself to a small dark hot chocolate, just as I did several weeks ago on my birthday.

This time, I brought a full-size notebook, tucking it in my purse so I could sit alongside the anonymous women of Cambridge: young women in pairs, chatting, and middle-aged women like me, shrouded in invisibility as we sit writing or reading over our solitary beverages. Early on a Sunday morning, men seem to venture into Burdicks only briefly to purchase coffee or chocolates to go, or they hurry in to join a wife or daughter after having accomplished the manly work of parking the car.

This, I’ve decided, is one of the key differences between women and men in our culture. Women willingly go places alone, sit alone, and are perfectly content to be left alone as long as they have a book, magazine, or notebook to occupy themselves. Men, on the other hand, need women to accompany them. A man needs a woman to pull him out of his isolation, to drag him into chocolate shops he’d never venture into on his own, and to make introductions and small talk and niceties. A man needs a woman (in other words) to do the emotional labor of socializing.

A lone woman–particularly a lone woman of a certain age–embraces her invisibility; she cherishes it, in fact, after so many years of being the object of others’ eyes. A man, on the other hand, needs a woman on his arm–the younger and prettier the better–to become visible, to be noticed, to make both an entrance and an impression. A lone man loitering is a threat–an object of suspicion–but a lone woman slips unobtrusively under the radar. The proverbial fly on the wall was, I am certain, female. Who better to observe and record the actions of others than a creature who is small, insignificant, and overlooked: a mousy creature, not a preening peacock.

There are, of course, exceptions; the differences I’ve outlined between women and men are, after all, conditioned, not innate. When I first arrived at Burdicks this morning, there was a young man sitting alone at a table across from me. Before I could wonder whether he was waiting for a wife or girlfriend, however, this young man pulled out a camera: a large SLR with a fancy lens that served to justify his presence. Snapping a shot of the delicate, dangling lights overhead–the same lights I’d surreptitiously shot with my phone, with no fancy lens necessary–this young man promptly packed his expensive camera into his backpack and left: mission accomplished.

When I chose a table this morning, I didn’t sit alongside this man or at the row of empty tables near him; instead, I squeezed into a single table between two lone women, one on either side. The ways that women and men behave in public are conditioned, not innate, but they are conditioned deeply. Men take up space with their backpacks and large cameras, and women (especially those of a certain age) shrink into the spaces between, our invisibility a silent, secret strength that allows us to see.

There is a horse-chestnut (aka buckeye) tree I pass every time I park in my usual spot at Framingham State, and this past semester, I fell into the habit of picking up a single buckeye every morning I came to campus to teach. Buckeyes remind me of Ohio, so it became a comforting ritual to pick up a buckeye, polish it in my hand as I walked to my office, and then place it on my desk as that day’s amulet: a good luck-eye.

Last week, I gathered all these buckeyes into a basket, each representing a day when I commuted to campus with the usual assortment of worries, obligations, and distractions. Whether it was rainy or sunny, I picked up a buckeye. Whether I was tired, discouraged, or feeling energized, I picked up a buckeye. Whether I was running late or had arrived early, I picked up a buckeye.

Whereas my students get something tangible at the end of each semester–a grade and whatever credits they’ve accrued–teaching can sometimes feel as futile as a dog chasing her tail. After so much energy poured into lectures, quizzes, and essay drafts, what (if anything) did I or anyone accomplish? At the end of yet another semester, it felt oddly satisfying to have accumulated a tangible thing: not something I made, for sure, but something I gradually gathered, a reminder of moments that might have otherwise slipped away without notice.

If I had to pick a favorite month, November would be my choice. Fall is my favorite season, and late fall is my favorite time. After the bright and blustery days of October, November descends as a kind of muted gloom. Many trees have lost their leaves, and in places the ground below is more colorful than the branches above. Early autumn draws the eye upward toward changing foliage, and in late fall we look down toward earth again.

November is dying time. Leaning deep toward winter, trees suck their juices into their roots, leaving their leaves to wither and branches to dry. November is when nature closes up shop, putting a sudden stop to the fervent fecundity of summer. When Herman Melville wanted to describe the morbid urge that sent Ishmael to sea, he described the damp, drizzly November of his soul. All rivers wend toward an ocean end, and Christians remind themselves of this with a pair of November holidays that commemorate the dead: All Saints Day yesterday, and All Souls Day today.

During the month of October, our religiously diverse neighborhood goes all out decorating for Halloween: Christmas lights are rare here, but in October there are plenty of ghouls and skeletons hanging around. The inevitability of death, it turns out, is something that Christians, Jews, Muslims, and certainly Buddhists can agree upon. Whatever the shade of your skin or the posture of your prayer, in the end our bones will all molder the same.

Earlier this week while listening to news coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, I heard how community members have spent shifts at the coroner’s office, praying with the deceased rather than leaving them there alone. I’m not Jewish, but I my immediate response to this story was recognition: yes, of course we need to keep company with the dead, praying however we are accustomed. And with that thought, I began to weep, not only for the named ones who died in Pittsburgh but for any and all who have died alone, too soon, or with unfinished business: the only kind of soul, legend tells us, in danger of becoming a ghost.

Buddhists have no illusions about the afterlife: I’m comforted by the bright blankets of November because I recognize that as the leaves and seasons pass, so too are we each destined to die. In November, all souls sit with the dying landscape, keeping her company as she passes from one season to the next. At this time of year and during this week of senseless slaughter, I’m reminded of a line from the Dhammapada: All beings tremble before their death. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?

It’s already November, past the midpoint of a season that still feels new. Already the maples have lost their leaves and the oaks their acorns. Already autumn is rounding toward its end, and the light like the year has begun to wane.

Like many across the nation, I watched Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony at work on Thursday, streaming C-SPAN on my phone during my office hours. I found Ford’s calm, quiet voice to be devastatingly powerful and entirely believable. Like many women, I resonated deeply with the obvious terror and trauma she felt at being pinned down, groped, and muffled when she was a teen at a party.

I had classes to teach during Brett Kavanaugh’s corresponding testimony, but I watched clips from it later, and I was horrified by his partisan rancor and angry defensiveness. Nobody can blame Kavanaugh for being angry at the humiliation he and his family have faced in the media, but Ford has been subjected to the same treatment, and she didn’t rant or rage. A confirmation hearing is a glorified job interview, and given the serious issues the Supreme Court decides, I had no patience for Kavanaugh’s angry tantrums and disrespectful demeanor, especially toward Senator Amy Klobuchar. Regardless of whether Ford’s accusations are true, Kavanaugh’s true temperament was on display on Thursday, and his performance didn’t convince me he’d be a calm, measured, or impartial justice.

The full impact of both Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimony didn’t hit me until afterward. When I woke on Friday morning, I felt the same oscillation between sadness and rage I’d felt the day after the 2016 election. Although I’ve never experienced an assault as violent or traumatic as Ford’s, like most women I have my own history of uninvited encounters: groping and self-stimulating creeps on the T, a massage therapist who insisted on kneading my thighs and backside even after I repeatedly directed him toward my stiff neck and shoulders, and countless staring strangers and cat-callers.

To be a woman means being constantly on guard, something so ingrained it’s easy to forget that men don’t have the same worries. Without thinking twice, I check the backseat every time I get into my car; in parking garages, I quietly weigh the dangers of getting trapped in an elevator versus getting cornered in a stairwell. When I hike, I realize that if I were to be mugged or raped, I would also be blamed for that attack: what was I thinking when I ventured into the woods, even with a dog? On a daily basis, I envy men for the simple luxury of being able to walk outside after dark, and I wonder what it’s like not to see every lone stranger as a possible predator.

Years ago when my then-husband and I lived near a state forest with brown bears, we bought a shotgun for home defense. The first time I fired it, I was overwhelmed by its deafening sound and earth-shaking recoil. Never in my life had I, a petite woman, made such a strong and loud impact. “So this is what it’s like to have a penis,” I thought, immediately realizing that if I walked through the world with a weapon on my hip, nobody would mess with me. At that moment, I understood I’d been conditioned my entire life to see myself as prey: a small, vulnerable creature, ever on the defensive.

On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford found something more powerful and earth-shaking than a shotgun: the power of a courageous voice. From where I sat, Ford’s calm and sometimes quavering words were more powerful than all of Brett Kavanaugh’s shouted rancor. I have no doubt the Republicans will confirm Kavanaugh, regardless of what a weeklong FBI investigation finds: patriarchy always defends its own, and the party of Trump has become the party of angry and aggrieved white men. But in the aftermath of Ford’s testimony, countless women like me will continue to do what we’ve always done, gestating our rage into resilience and simmering our sadness into a hidden elixir of resolve.

Writers, like children, are not dissuaded by the uselessness of hoarded ordinaries; instead, we cultivate a collector's sense, trying to capture mundane moments on a string of words.
--Lorianne DiSabato